Conventionally, web site editing, creating, and updating has been on the entire web site as a totality. This technique, however, does not consider the case where creating, editing, and updating a web site is performed in a plurality of editing environments. When allowing for a plurality of editing environments the following techniques have been adopted. A first method has been to create individual partial sites by dividing the entire web site and a second method has been to perform distributed development of a web site by using a source server or the like.
While a file distributed management system is disclosed in Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2000-57373 and Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication (Kokai) No. 2000-66118, these do not teach how to edit a web site in distributed environments without a source server.
Examples of a situation requiring creating, editing, and updating a web site in a plurality of editing environments are as follows: a company wants to entrust editing or other processing of a subsite of a certain department on the company's web site to the department concerned; a board of education wants to entrust editing or other processing of a subsite of each school association on the web site of the board of education to the school association concerned; and a school association wants to entrust editing or other processing of a subsite of each class on the web site of the school association to the class concerned. The aforementioned first and second methods, however, cannot always fully satisfy a user's request.
In the first method, the files of the entire site are not locally owned in individual editing environments. Therefore, a user cannot use, for example, a link to a subsite of another department or an image used throughout the entire site (for example, a logo image of a company name) in an editing environment of a partial site. On the other hand, in the second method, the files of the entire site are locally owned in individual editing environments. Therefore, a user can easily use a link to a subsite of another department or an image used throughout the entire site. There is, however, a potential for the user to edit or delete the link to the subsite of another department or the image used throughout the entire site by mistake.
In view of these technical problems, the present invention has been provided. Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a web site editing method, a web site editing system, and a web site editing program enabling both an improvement in efficiency and safety of editing partial sites.